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Marijke Colle

Marijke Colle is an Executive C0-Director the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam. She studied Biology at the Ghent State University and was always interested in ecology and the protection of the environment. As a student, she was active in radical left movements, in solidarity with the May 68 Revolt and in the campaigns against the Vietnam War. She became a founding member of the RAL/LRT, Belgian Section of the Fourth International in 1970. The seventies were also the start of the women’s movement in Belgium and she was centrally involved in the struggle for free abortion and contraception on demand and later on, also in the struggles of trade-union women against the crisis. She participated in writing the Resolution on Women’s Liberation for the XIth World Congress of the Fourth International in 1979. In 2008, she became involved in the founding process of the NPA in France and was elected in the national leadership of the NPA in January 2009.

It is with a profound sense of sadness that we at AIDC have heard the news of the passing of Carl Brecker, the first Chairperson of the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC). We send our condolences to his family, especially his devoted daughters Tania and Dee, their children as well as his sister Valerie and her husband Ivan.

After weeks of moral preparation, diplomatic pressure and massive disinformation, the Turkish state has finally attacked the predominantly Kurdish enclave of Afrin, located in north-western Syria. Skilfully playing on the cleavages between Washington and Moscow, the Turkish President has launched a major military operation involving air strikes, the deployment of Islamist militias and the incursion of Turkish troops on Syrian soil ready for the offensive.

Mass demonstrations took place in the cities of Shiraz, Khorramabad and Kerman Shah, a predominantly Kurdish city, to protest the high cost of living, poverty, unemployment and participation in the war in Syria, which caused damage to the Iranian economy according to the demonstrators.